Microsoftâs head of gaming and Xbox chief Phil Spencer has given a public apology over the launch state of its newest big first-party release “Redfall”.
The vampire-themed, co-op play, open-world looter/shooter title has been plagued by a number of technical issues, along with plenty of poor reviews regarding both the gameplay and technical issues.
The critics aggregate scores stand at just 62/100 (Cbox) and 58/100 (PC) on Metacritic, whilst the user scores are far lower at 2.6/10 & 1.9/10 respectively. On Steam, the game has ‘Mostly Negative’ reviews.
Speaking about the disappointing reception with Kinda Funny Games in an extensive 40-minute interview, Spencer says he did not expect such a negative reception to the game according to their own internal testing:
“I know that these games are $70, and I’m going to take full responsibility for launching a game that needs to be great. We let a lot of people down this week with the launch of the game, but we will continue to strive on. You have to â that’s what creativity is about…
There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community. I’ve been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, I’m head of the business, I have a lot of friends and get a lot of feedback, and just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.
We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game through [those]. That’s one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game that we thought was going to review in the low 60s â it’s not part of our goalsâĤ this game was significantly below our internal metrics compared to where it actually reviewed. But that’s not on anybody but us â we have to own that”.
Spencer was asked how the company goes about deciding whether a game should be delayed. Spencer says when it comes to a production timeline being too short to realise a vision, that’s when they do delay games such as with “Starfield”. In regards to “Redfall,” he says:
“There are quality issues and we’re working on those, but a fundamental piece of feedback I get [from Redfall reviews] is that the game isn’t realising the creative vision that it had for its players.
That doesn’t feel like a, ‘hey, just delay it’, that feels like the game had a goal to do one thing and when players are actually playing, they’re not feeling that… I’m a huge supporter of Arkane Austin: their track record is awesome, and I love a lot of the great games that they’ve built. This is one where the team didn’t hit their own internal goals.
Spencer adds that Bethesda and developer Arkane will continue to support “Redfall” with a 60fps update currently being worked on. He adds that Xbox has shown a commitment to games, citing “Sea of Thieves” and “Grounded” as titles that have received long-term support.
In terms of lessons learnt, Spencer says he believes Xbox should have done more early in the game’s development in terms of providing assistance to Arkane and setting expectations for what a first-party game needs to deliver.
He says he also believes the platform holder “did a better job” with Bethesda’s upcoming sci-fi RPG title “Starfield” in terms of assisting development, as the game was earlier in production when Xbox acquired it.
Source: VGC
